CSS in 2025: Let's write html inlined styles as if it was 2005 and separation of formatting/representation was never invented. I talk of tailwind, of course.
Are we still complaining about Tailwind? This ship has sailed. The world is so much better than the old BEM/LESS hell, it is wonderful. UnoCSS is even greater in empowering frontend developers.
I was recently doing some very specific web scraping of some very public very static documents. About 25% of them use a soup of divs with hashes for class names. Not a <main> or <article> or <section> in sight. I am fine with the idea of what tailwind does but like at least using semantic tags where appropriate could be a thing.
That's totally orthogonal to Tailwind though; there's nothing that precludes you from combining semantic elements with it. The only thing that would make a dev reach for <div class="m-2"> instead of <article class="m-2"> is the dev's own (lack of) taste. It's no different than writing out separate CSS or using inline styles.
You can grumble at web developers in general for things like div soup, but the hostility towards tailwind is misplaced. Hashed classes aren’t even tailwind, and the tools that generate them are not the problem either.
I do sympathise as someone who has to scrape content from time to time, but that doesn't sound like a problem for the author of the content or something that impacts their intended user.
tailwind is very much not a problem for accessibility? if your content is semantic and you add the appropriate aria tags, whether or not you have 300 classes or 1 will make no difference for screen readers
I'm pretty sure unreadable class names are a byproduct, but perhaps some people may also consider it a feature, of their particular build process.
so they may very well have semantic tags in their development environment. Of course debugging things becomes more difficult for the developer as well unless there is some sort of lookup table to tell them that class .uv.le in the browser maps to .user.name in their codebase, in which case it only becomes marginally slower for some cases.
Tbh there's nothing really wrong with that. You don't need stuff like article or section if you set the right attributes. Often easier to just use divs to get the structure right, and figure out the meaning later.
And there's 'nothing wrong' with just writing code with variables named 'a1, a2, a3'. But when some poor sod has to dig through your mess to figure out what you had in mind it turns out that having an easier to discern logical structure to your code (or html) makes it better. I've dug through a lot of html. And there's a ton of ugly code smell out there. Layers and layers of "I don't really know what I'm doing but I guess it looks okay and I'll make it make sense later". I'm sure it pays the bills for someone. But it makes me sad.
Besides the points raised here, I think it's worth noting that using stuff like the article tag does not necessarily make things easier to maintain. You do indeed get a lower line count, but you're coupling the structure and meaning. Sometimes that's fine, but a11y can be tricky to get right and it's often easier to push it off until you've got something working first.
Except that as a developer you have access to the original source code where things are well structured. It only turns into div soup after the React/Vue code gets compiled down to HTML+CSS+JS that can run on any browser.
I don't think "separation of concerns" is entirely dead. Ideally, the CSS is readable and maintainable, and that implies structure. If you have a bunch of (co-)related components, you don't want to find/replace tailwind class names when you need to change the layout. So you separate that part of the layout in classes based on (layout!) functionality. You can see that as "concerns."
Ah, yeah. I spent the early 2010s writing front-ends in AS3, so imagine how that turned out. I wrote my own event system too when I was forced to head to javascript, but in the end I mostly just used jquery's, and it's still what I use. I agree the event-driven paradigm leads to sloppy code, but static event names are enough of a clue to what's invoked most of the time, even in relatively large projects. And most things can sensibly just be promisified now anyway, besides user interactions.
I thought it was funny that you wrote this way back when:
>> I've often seen projects where I think "what talks to what and how? What is the separation of concerns and where does this code live?"
Okay. I personally don’t care for anyone so chronically online that they think that their interactions with other similarly chronically online people is at all representative of the userbase of something as immensely widely used as Tailwind.
Whatever the professional equivalent of ‘touching grass’ is, I suggest you do that at your earliest convenience.
SoC is how all maintainable software is built. A function for A, a class for B, DDD-spec'd modules and features, databases on separate machines, API definitions, queuing systems, event systems, load balancing, web servers.
You don't even need to think of the web to see how content and presentation are different. Try editing a text file with hard line breaks in and you'll quickly understand how presentation and content are orthogonal.
Please don’t be so condescending. We all know what separation of concerns is.
The comment said “web development”, and it’s inarguably that in the history of web development there have been at least a couple of major misapplications of separation of concerns, which have had practically everlasting negative consequences.
Read what you’re replying to before you reply to it.
You can separate concerns without violating locality of behavior, and that’s exactly what tailwind does.
It admittedly does not do a good job at being very DRY but I think that’s poorly applied to HTML/CSS in general, and the most DRY css is often over abstracted to the point of becoming nigh uninterpretable.
When I write CSS, I most often do not want the locality of behavior. I instead want uniformity of behavior, hence "semantic" styles. Even the trivial light / dark mode switching is pain with Tailwind, when classes like "color-gray-200" are routinely applied.
I’d somewhat agree with you there, but I usually use variables for uniformity. I do see arguments against tailwind but find anytime I’ve tried to do anything else it just feels like bikeshedding on internals for the same end result.
Really what I want to see is beautiful TDD for CSS so that uniformity can be enforced, but I’m not sure that exists.
Variables are hugely helpful, I agreee.
IDK about bikeshedding. I'm very used to writing React code that normally declares no styles for components at all, and having CSS that style components using 1-2 classes, specific to these components. Container components control margins, <body> controls general things like fonts.
It seems that what solves the problem is a good component library. "But I need red text here!" For what reason? It's a warning. OK, we've got <Text variant="warning">, it will be styled appropriately, and will look like every other warning in the application.
I tend to think that if you're having issues with repeating yourself with stuff like tailwind you probably need to refactor your JSX/templates to share the repeated code. Keeping stuff like CSS isolated is a deliberate choice that helps massively with stuff like splitting code, and keeping changes side effect free.
HTML vs. CSS is a separation of technologies. If HTML was really only about the content and the CSS was only about styling, we wouldn't have to write div soups to style our websites (.container-wrapper .container .container-inner { /* "separation" */ }) and we wouldn't have to adjust our HTML when we change the layout.
But for that designers should care about the limitations. But they don’t care. Not even about the more basic ones. I’m quite sure many of them don’t even know. Mainly, because their customers are not the one who code.
I got many designs for websites where customers told me that they want a pixel perfect version. The funniest one was when my boss who supposed to be a “senior” web developer told me this. Of course, there is no such thing on the web or really anywhere. Actually, I’ve never seen a design plan in which wildly different aspect ratios and sizes were really considered.
If the designer is not aware of the ins and outs of the medium they are supposedly working with, they are not a very well informed and educated designer.
Just like I don't presume to be able to make a great product packaging design, without knowing firstly much more about visual composition and design, but also secondly the material and form and shape I am designing for. Will that be a plastic wrapper, a paper wrapper or some cardboard packaging? Without knowing the limitations and properties of each, how can I expect to create a good design?
Being that uninformed to me seems like not giving a shit about the quality of work one delivers, ergo not giving a shit about ones job, or simply not having the required understanding or skill to be any good at ones job.
Fine for a static site which is frozen at the first version forever.
So, so, painful for apps which need to change and evolve over time, which I'm currently experiencing. It's too easy to break the bits where you needed to get clever to make a layout variant work.
I did also did a Zen Garden on YouTube recently when they removed the list view option from Subscriptions, restyling their grid markup was a fun CSS exercise.
If everything in your code is a React component, I get why you would just want to write the styles right there.[0]
Then again, why write `<Button>` if you could just write `<button>` and style it with standard CSS.
Obfuscate? I can learn tailwind and use it in dozens of projects. I can use tailwind in my project and onboard dozens of developers immediately. I can learn your CSS conventions and use them in exactly one project.
He wrote "learn your CSS conventions" which implies that every team and every project will have a different set of conventions. Hidden inside that statement is the fact that he just accepted that Tailwind should be THE CSS convention, something I personally disagree with but to each their own.
What stops you from doing the same thing in CSS? It is trivial to assign a specific CSS class to an element that is the root node of a "component" and scope rules under that.
Jumping up and down in the file is not much better and you still need to come up with names for classes. I want to look at an element and immediately know how it's styled.
In my lived experience, shared components just become another problem. Especially in a fledgling company, the iteration velocity is actually negatively affected by shared libs because there's always overhead to (not) break legacy. so shared components bloat to address every evolving need.
And now with AI generated code i see so many wrapper patterns that forward endless props down, it's crazy!
TLDR: i almost always end up branching out into evergreen "reusable" components anyway.
Very unlikely the component library the CTO asked claude to DRY up the code with, is the one to rule them all.
FWIW, “colocation in component-based architecture” doesn’t necessarily mean shared code. It can just mean the one thing has all of its parts in one place, instead of having HTML in one file, CSS in another, JS in another.
You’re right about DRY and code reuse very often being a premiere (wrong) abstraction, which is usually more of a problem than a few copy/pastes, because premature wrong abstractions become entrenched and harder to displace.
Without a lot of discipline it is very easy to end up with a css with lots of unclear and hard to guess effects. Eg consider the case of <A type=1><B><A type=2></A></B></A> where A and B are complex templates. Any selector with the " " operator on A risk expanding to the inner A even if it was intended only for the outer. Similarly a :has selector might catch a descendant of the wrong element.
@scope fixes a lot of this, but it is a complex problem. With tailwind you mostly have to worry about inheritance
The problem is that the styles for something can be defined in multiple places, and that makes it hard. Especially with CSS and (potentially) having specificity issues if things aren't managed well. Having them as a part of the component means that problem goes away.
this is grey text from tailwindcss.com, I wouldn't call it easy and readable.
<div class="relative before:absolute before:top-0 before:h-px before:w-[200vw] before:bg-gray-950/5 dark:before:bg-white/10 before:-left-[100vw] after:absolute after:bottom-0 after:h-px after:w-[200vw] after:bg-gray-950/5 dark:after:bg-white/10 after:-left-[100vw]"><p class="max-w-(--breakpoint-md) px-2 text-base/7 text-gray-600 max-sm:px-4 dark:text-gray-400">Because Tailwind is so low-level, it never encourages you to design the same site twice. Some of your favorite sites are built with Tailwind, and you probably had no idea.</p></div>
In my editor this looks like this, with an extension like Tailwind Fold or Inline Fold:
<div class="...">
<p class="...">
Because Tailwind is so low-level, it never encourages you to design the same site twice. Some of your favorite sites are built with Tailwind, and you probably had no idea.
</p>
</div>
Great. Another overly dramatic blog post from years ago from someone with a chip on their shoulder, calling that the sky is falling, when it’s very clear that it didn’t actually fall.
There's nothing in Tailwind that makes the craftsmanship dead, and your proposed solution with scoped styles somehow a revival of said craftsmanship.
Note how your solution literally depends on a build tool (Vue) to work. Whereas Tailwind can work with no build tools (tailwind build tools removes unused classes, and that's mostly it).
And then you go:
--- start quote ---
Juniors still come along and just do margin: 13px. In tailwind, they do m-[13px]. No difference. At least with CSS its centralized.
--- end quote ---
When your scoped CSS example is literally decentralized per-file CSS that has `margin: 5px` in it. That gets compiled into a meaningless `class-678x8789g` by the build tool.
> The people I've seen who are most excited over tailwind are generally those that would view frontend as something they have to do, not something they want to do.
Also modern CSS is often written in a <style> tag either in a native web component or in a framework which supports single file component like vue or svelte.
Cognitive load of looking at 12 open files trying to understand what’s happening. Well, in fairness some of those 12 are the same file because we have one part for the default CSS and then one for the media query that’s 900 lines further down the file.
Yeah and it's a really good idea. You can't really 'separate layout from style.' The layout and the style are both parts of the UI. HTML isn't the content, it's the layout.
Even if you believe separation of concerns is the eleventh commandment, HTML and CSS are the same kind of 'concern' anyway. They're both at representation layer. Pretending you can decouple them is just burying the head in the sand.
The "C" (Cascade) in CSS doesn't suck, the education about it sucks.
People don't know how it works, then things go wrong so they learn to work around it.
That's what led to things like div + class soup that you get with the BEM naming convention or Tailwind.
The cascade is actually awesome, super powerful and if you know how to use it, it can greatly simplify your code.
Education is the problem and the solution.
---
To anyone outside the CSS space, this is the closest analogy I can find:
In the American education system, there was a recent-ish change where children are "taught" to read using a method of just learning the shape of every word (e.g. "thermally" has a th at the start and ly at the end, so it must be the word "thermally", despite other similar looking words like thematically).
The method was disproven but the American education system still uses it.
Now illiteracy rates are climbing where almost 1/4 Americans (USA) can't read.
It's basically the same thing with CSS, where developers don't know what the code they're reading/writing is actually going to do.
It has nothing to do with education, software development is not learnt in a centralized way so you could hardly claim anything based on that.
Cascading simply fails to scale/work with web applications, especially when multiple people work in parallel.
HTML both describes content AND layout, so you simply can't separate the two. This was a nice dream when the internet was "markdown encoded in html", but the moment you write a nested <div> for layout purposes you lost. So HTML has to be written together with CSS, so we get no separation. Now what is it that you could meaningfully cascade? (If anything, variables are all that we needed)
Add to it that people are using third-party components as well, and now many "widgets" starts by resetting outside styling rules.
I don't think anyone in this thread is arguing that inheritance or specificity is hard to understand.
My issue with cascading style sheets is mainly that namespace pollution (as every selector is defined in the same global namespace) means that short selectors (.separator, .highlight, .button) are likely to collide with completely unrelated parts of the application. BEM and tailwind are popular because they localize styles to specific components, preventing namespace issues. Today, most web frameworks deal with components, so it makes a lot of sense to localize the styles to the components. Scoped css in vue/svelte allows you to write short selectors, and have them only apply to the component they are written in, without needing to prefix them with a component name.
I call it cargo cult developing. People develop bags of spells and tricks that they attempt to apply to a situation to solve a problem. Usually they can arrive at a solution by trying a number of these incantations, but not always. And never actually ask them what the incantation does
It's not just css either. At a job I've worked, we had a VPN client that would get into a weird state, where it needed to be killed to restart. An incantation that made use of ps, grep, awk, and xargs was provided, instead of just using pkill
> That's what led to things like div + class soup that you get with the BEM naming convention or Tailwind.
You could try and think why people end up with BEM or Tailwind. And the answer isn't "because people are not educated about cascade". Both BEM and Tailwind came form people who are very much aware of the cascade.
The problem is that cascade is very much a hindrance in quite a few cases. Especially when you deal with components and design systems.
> To anyone outside the CSS space, this is the closest analogy I can find
All analogies are bullshit.
The truth is that CSS is designed for documents, and for a few decades people have been trying to use it to design/build components: https://x.com/simonswiss/status/1664736786671869952 Cascade is good for the former, and is death for the latter.
And browser vendors have been surprisingly stubborn when it comes to making any improvements to the DX in this area. That's why instead of locally scoped CSS, CSS nesting, CSS mixins (and a bunch of other improvements from SASS and various JS Frameworks) we first got 15 000 JS-only specs around web components, of which 14 999 can be covered by improvements to CSS.
> where developers don't know what the code they're reading/writing is actually going to do.
Lol. Tailwind has made people more aware of what CSS does, with better documentation, than decades of bullshit articles and millions of words of existing docs.
If you move the data (the M and the C) entirely out of react, and only pass it in via props, there would be only one place — the root react node — where the props could get into react. Is this what you have in mind? Or are you envisioning multiple root nodes?
Well, i've always been a fan of the island architecture that effectively mounts root nodes as little islands of isolated state, yes.
Mainly this avoids the hell that global state SPA patterns produce: redux, reducer patterns in general, and 8 thousand context providers.
I do think there's use cases that warrant global in-memory state, but it's such a pain in the ass to maintain and evolve, i'd always plan against it. Every html node in your app does not need to know about literally everything going on and react instantly to it. it just doesn't.
Just make another page!
Also: so the islands pattern can be as fancy or rudimentary as desired. they can bootstrap themselves via async endpoints, they can be shipped as web components even, or they can be static, pre-hydrated in some manner.
Do you need react at this point? Isn’t it just html/css/components?
I remember the birth of React was because Facebook had a problem - you would add a comment and your notification bar would sometimes not get updated.
They had so many bugs with normal html / css that they wanted to solve this on the application layer - to make inconsistent UI elements unrepresentable.
So they came up with react with global state - because in their use case changing one thing does affect a bunch of other unrelated things, and they all need to sync together.
I mean honestly that’s what I use React _for_ - especially with contexts it’s very easy to express all of this complex interconnected state of a webapp in a consistent way.
And of course there are other ways to solve it - for example with elixir/phoenix you just push all that complexity to the backend and trust in websockets and the BEAM.
I just feel that if you really don’t need global state, then react kinda isn’t needed as well…
> I just feel that if you really don’t need global state, then react kinda isn’t needed as well…
I don't know, in my mind "re-render (efficiently) when state changes" is the core point of react and similar frameworks. That requirement still stands even if I have a smaller, local state.
The islands pattern is underrated for maintainability. I've found the biggest win isn't even the state isolation — it's that each island can have a completely independent upgrade path. You can rewrite one island from React to vanilla JS (or whatever comes next) without touching anything else.
The global state SPA pattern fails for a more fundamental reason than just being painful to maintain: it creates an implicit contract between every component in the app. Change one reducer and you're debugging side effects three layers away. Islands make the contract explicit — each one owns its data, full stop.
The one gotcha I've hit is cross-island communication. PostMessage works but gets messy. Custom events on a shared DOM ancestor end up being the cleanest pattern for the rare cases where islands genuinely need to coordinate.
I think the parent wants to separate the V from the M/C. If you smuggle signals inside of components to avoid prop drilling, you would be coupling the M/C and the V. I suppose that's not what the parent has in mind.
M stands for Model layer. This layer handles business logic and knows nothing about UI. It does not have any html or CSS.
V stands for View. This layer handles HTML and CSS. You can use React here.
C stands for Controller. Controllers know about Views and Models and which model objects to instantiate for which view. It makes REST API calls and does caching, and handles errors. Controllers know about the application state and decide what page to display next.
In the original MVC architecture, the fundamental idea was that the model was responsible for storing the application state, a view was responsible for rendering output to the user, and a controller was responsible for responding to user interactions.
The model can be completely unaware of any specific views or controllers. It only needs to provide an interface allowing views to observe the current state and controllers to update that state.
In practice, views and controllers usually aren’t independent and instead come as a pair. This is because most modern UIs use some kind of event-driven architecture where user interactions are indicated by events from some component rendered by the view that the controller then handles.
My go-to example to understand why this architecture is helpful is a UI that features a table showing some names and a count for each, alongside a chart visualising that data graphically. Here you would have a model that stores the names and counts as pure data, and you would have two view+controller pairs, one managing the table and one the chart. Each view observes the model and renders an updated table or chart when the model state changes. Each controller responds to user interactions that perhaps edit a name or change its count — whether by typing a new value as text in an editable table cell or by dragging somewhere relevant in the chart — by telling the model to update its state to match (which in turn causes all views observing the model to refresh, without any further action from whichever controller happened to be handling that user interaction).
In practical terms for a React application, we might implement this with a simple object/Map somewhere that holds the names and values (our “model”) and two top-level React components that each get rendered once into some appropriate container within the page. Each component would have props to pass in (a) the current state and (b) any functions to be called when the user makes a change. Then you just write some simple glue logic in plain old JavaScript/TypeScript that handles keeping track of observers of the model, registering an observer for each top-level component that causes it rerender when the state changes, and providing a handler for each type of change the user is allowed to make that updates the state and then notifies the observers.
There are lots of variations on this theme, for example once you start needing more complicated business logic to interpret a user interaction and decide what state change is required or you need to synchronise your front-end model state with some remote service. However, you can scale a very long way with the basic principle that you hold your application state as pure data in a model that doesn’t know anything about any specific user interface or remote service and instead provides an interface for any other modules in the system to observe and/or update that state.
I've heard many people assert that 2 way binding is a mistake, but I didn't think it was settled. It still seems simpler to me than so called uni-directional data flow.
When React launched in 2013, its defining idea was strict one-way data flow: parents pass data down via props, and updates happen in a clear, explicit place. Children can't mutate parent state directly; they signal changes through callbacks. The result is predictable, traceable state changes.
This contrasted with MVVM frameworks like early AngularJS, Knockout, and WPF, which relied on two-way data binding. That automatic syncing felt convenient for small apps, but at scale it often led to hidden coupling and hard-to-trace update chains.
Over time, many developers came to view pervasive two-way binding as a design mistake in complex systems. React's unidirectional model gained traction because it favored clarity and control over "magic."
Thanks GPT but I know all of that. I was expecting some eye opening new evidence because person I was asking seemed really confident and using strong words.
But that’s just generic „blablabla”. MVVM is not a mistake and is still plenty useful.
Ever heard of Django? ASP.NET? Most UI frameworks, including ASP.NET Core, Spring Boot (Java based framework), Ruby on Rails, and Django (Python) are all based on MVC.
Those are all stateless MVC over HTTP, which is a very different architecture from stateful MVC for long-lived UI. The latter was invented for Smalltalk by Trygve Reenskaug, and is far more relevant to front-end web.
Stateful MVC uses Publisher/Subscriber (or Observer) to keep Views and Controllers up-to-date with changing Models over time, which is irrelevant for stateless MVC over HTTP. Plus, in stateful MVC the View and Controller are often "pluggable," where a given Controller+Model may use a different View for displaying the same data differently (e.g. table vs. pie chart), or a given View+Model may use a different Controller for handling events differently (e.g. mouse+keyboard vs. game controller). Whereas, in stateless MVC over HTTP, the controller is the "owner" of the process, and won't generally be replaced.
And in the world of front-end web, stateful MVC really is mostly dead. MVVM and Component-based architectures (using the Composite pattern) have replaced it. A runtime is usually responsible for wiring up events, rather than individual controllers. Controllers don't need to be swappable because events can be given semantic meaning in components, and Views don't need to be swappable because you can instead render a sub-composite to change how the data is shown.
Is the Controller not in a coupled pair with a View? We could imagine an interface where it could be completely separate (e.g. a kiosk TUI where stuff like "press 'r' for X" is displayed), but in the vast majority of UIs the View has state, and the Controller has to depend on that state (e.g. did this keypress happen with a text field focused). Sure, this is abstracted away via the UI framework and we operate on usually some form of event system.
But even then, I don't really see how we could have a non-coupled controller-view. In fact, I seem to remember that it was described in a similar way for Smalltalk even.
You can have decoupled Controllers from Views using React. That's the basis of the "original" Flux/Redux architecture used by React developers 10+ years ago when React was just beginning to get traction.
A flux/redux "Store" acts as a Model -> contains all the global state and exactly decides what gets rendered. A flux/redux "Dispatcher" acts as a Controller. And React "Components" (views) get their props from the "Store" and send "events" to "dispatcher", which in turn modifies the "Store" and forces a redraw.
Of course they aren't "entirely decoupled" because the view still has to call the controller functions, but the same controller action can be called from multiple views, and you can still design the architecture from Model, through Controller (which properties can change under what conditions) and then design the Views (where the interactions can happen).
Whether application state is short-lived (e.g., request/response CRUD) or long-lived (e.g., an in-memory interactive UI) is orthogonal to MVC. MVC is a structural separation of responsibilities between model, view, and control logic. The duration of state affects implementation strategy, not the applicability of the pattern itself.
MVC is a structural separation of responsibilities between model, view, and control logic.
Yes, but the “MVC” pattern used by various back-end web frameworks that borrowed the term a while back actually has very little to do with the original MVC of the Reenskaug era.
The original concept of MVC is based on a triangle of three modules with quite specific responsibilities and relationships. The closest equivalent on the back-end of a web application might be having a data model persisted via a database or similar, and then a web server providing a set of HTTP GET endpoints allowing queries of that model state (perhaps including some sort of WebSocket or Server-Sent Event provision to observe any changes) and a separate set of HTTP POST/PUT/PATCH endpoints allowing updates of the model state. Then on the back end, your “view” code handles any query requests, including monitoring the model state for changes and notifying any observers via WS/SSE, while your “controller” code handles any mutation requests. And then on the front end, you render your page content based on the back-end view endpoints, subscribe for notifications of changes that cause you to update your rendering, and any user interactions get sent to the back-end controller endpoints.
In practice, I don’t recall ever seeing an “MVC” back-end framework used anything like that. Instead, they typically have a “controller” in front of the “model” and have it manage all incoming HTTP requests, with “view” referring to the front-end code. This is fundamentally a tiered, linear relationship and it allocates responsibilities quite differently to the original, triangular MVC.
In case the author happens to read these - final statement in native CSS nesting is no longer true.
"The only small difference from Sass: for element selectors you need the & prefix. In Sass you could write a { color: red } inside a parent, but native CSS requires & a { color: red }."
It was true for a bit, but fixed within 2-3 releases iirc. You can now freely nav { a { color: red; } }
I dislike the examples here where the "old" way works in all browsers, but the "new" way only works in Chrome/Edge. IMO, it's irresponsible to include such examples, since it makes the Blink monoculture worse.
Agreed; wish the default filter was "newly available" since that includes all 3 major browsers (Chrome/Edge, Safari, Firefox) but still includes new stuff that isn't "baseline" yet.
Sometimes I'm developing an internal tool or something only for myself / handful of people. I'm perfectly fine saving time and complexity using a one liner modern CSS solution instead of having to rely on some hacky unreadable code to support 10 years of legacy browsers.
3) :is(...), before you had to write :not(:not(...)).
4) :where(...), similar to :is(...), but the selector weight inside :where becomes 0. Useful when you need deep/complex selectors without increasing the selector weight.
As a tip - most LLMs are unaware it exists due to either knowledge cutoff or not having enough training data for it.
As a recommendation, include some examples of it in your AGENTS.md. Here's what I use:
--------------------------------------
## CSS nesting (required)
When writing CSS (including component `css()` strings and `soci-frontend/soci.css`), *use modern CSS nesting* where it improves readability and reduces repetition.
- Prefer nesting with the `&` selector for pseudo-classes / pseudo-elements and compound selectors.
- Avoid duplicating the parent selector when nesting can express it once.
- Reference: [MDN `&` nesting selector](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/S...)
Mine is text-box: trim. Twenty years of trying to explain to graphic designers why it’s next to impossible possible to get the top of a capital letter to a box, I feel free like a bird.
Why/how do you grep selectors? Seems overly optimistic to be able to guess the particular rule pattern that is applying a style. Browser tools are much more reliable.
Let's say you're thrown into a website you've never worked on before and asked to fix a styling problem. You can look in the browser tools, but the website will only be running the compiled production version, and if the team knows what they're doing there won't be source maps available.
So you've now found selectors in DevTools that you think are causing the problem, and you want to find them in the source code. In the case of many projects, that means searching through hundreds of small CSS files.
That's why you grep selectors, and where the pain comes. You have to start with the most specific rules that you found in DevTools, then start deleting parts from them until you find a non-nested rule that's in the source, yet still specific enough that you haven't got hundreds of matches to go through.
It would be great if something like ast-grep could take a CSS rule copied from DevTools and search for nested CSS that would compile to match it.
Stop pinning things to the edges of the screen and window. Some sites have literally over 50% of the viewable area taken up by irrelevant static elements. Let the content scroll, like god intended.
It is an idea I started playing with when custom properties landed in browsers, around 2016 or 2017? Around 2021 I started using the technique in client sites too.
Now I want to write a 2026 version of the post that talks about container queries too. The technique becomes more powerful if you can rely on container queries and on the cqw unit. (You cannot always. That stuff is still new.)
For an example of the convenience cqw offers if you can rely on it, see the snippets I have in this:
In the past this was a major issue that meant useful features were only ever usable after IE/Safari finally supported them half a decade later, but it has seriously gotten better. Sadly as a result of Chromium's overbearing presence, but it's a helpful outcome at least.
Problem with safari though is that it’s tied to OS updates that many people just defer for insanely long periods of time. So unlike the other browsers, it’s not evergreen, so if you need to support any iOS users or Mac users who don’t use chrome etc, you’re out of luck
That would actually fix some ugly CSS I have. The demo works. Neat.
Except... the demo doesn't use either the old syntax or the new syntax. The browser support is wrong (Firefox doesn't support it, the site says Firefox 16+; it says Chrome 43+ but in reality it's much newer: Chrome 148+). It says "Since 2018" but the spec was introduced in 2024.
So maybe an interesting overview of things that might be available or might not, but the filtering and data on the site doesn't seem to be useful.
Firefox is pretty irrelevant nowadays. They've dragged their feet for years when it comes to implementing new stuff, and now web devs don't even bother checking Firefox. Because devs know it won't work on ancient browsers, no need to confirm.
My personal trigger events were when Firefox didn't optimize DataView for the longest time, initially refused to implement import maps, and couldn't get WebGPU support done. At that point I lost interest in supporting it.
Also one of the features that I want -- scrollbar-gutter: stable -- is shown everywhere as being stable for many Safari versions, but when I try it it just didn't work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well it's flat out wrong about some things, like `field-sizing: content`. Doesn't work in any version of Firefox, let alone Firefox 130+! It even links to caniuse, which says the same thing.
The "new" version doesn't even have the handle to manually expand the box - the old version does!
These green percentage points at the bottom left show how many of the Web audience (IDK by what measurements) runs a browser supporting this feature. A ton of them are even below 50%.
So I suppose it's not "modern CSS", but more like "latest Chrome CSS". Best viewed in Internet Explorer 5.
Live demo for input:user-invalid does not work on my phone.
It'd always been the same: those ugly patches of JavaScript were being added to maintain compatibility with all the browsers... That's why the newest CSS tricks were always out of reach for us
Tailwind works for your team? Go for it.
Inline CSS for your solo project? By all means.
Still stuck on SASS? It'll keep working just fine.
All in on modern CSS? More power to ya!
Go for it if Tailwind works for your team.
Inline CSS for your solo project? Chase your dream.
Still stuck on SASS? It'll work just fine.
All in on modern CSS? Go ahead and shine.
Congratulations to the creator of this site and thank you so much for posting it !
I have to (unwillingly) do frontend work so I recently read up on CSS quite a bit. I have always thought that using computed numbers for styling is bonkers. Its better to use CSS that uses logical values. The site seems to emphasize that style.
The color lightening/darkening is new to me. I have a bunch of older sites that still accomplish the same thing with Sass and Compass, but the Compass toolchain has been fiddly to keep running. Nice to see that as a new creature comfort.
Random pet peeve... it annoys me when people have old browser-specific aliases to standardized CSS properties. For example, -o-tab-size and -moz-tab-size instead of just tab-size. Those properties haven't done anything on Opera/Firefox for a decade!
I hate how it's still not possible to properly style the numbers in ordered lists.
I use them for code snippets with automatic line numbers, but it's literally impossible to space the numbers (relative to the code) while keeping them aligned to the right.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The first example of not using absolute positioning isn't a good example because sometimes you do need to absolutely position things, like a modal.
Also you can just use display: flex with justify-content: center and align-items: center for non absolutely positioned elements.
Just because it uses CSS grid does not make it more "correct" than flexbox.
I also only see one usage of custom @property properties here, which has been one of the most useful things to happen to CSS in years. They have many different use cases, particularly for complex animations.
Is it just me or gradients and tile grid with specific hover effects are AI generated stuff giveaways? Maybe it's old people yelling at clouds, but I'm very reluctant to trust the site, when I see these signs.
I too am saddened by the instant-polish marketing pages everyone and their grandma deploys to Render, but also some people at some point in time really did make these effects. And they are nice. HTML based UIs will always have a place in my heart.
Btw: actually I think webflow did more to pump this stuff out to the masses. The animate on scroll being the biggest offender. It's so good, but not for every literal text paragraph on your local bakery's website.
CSS is the only thing from browsers we actually need. The rest can be done in a terminal. Contemporary terminals could even render the UI with way less memory. The browser is a nightmare because it wasn’t architected to run applications.
> The browser ... wasn’t architected to run applications.
Could you explain this? What prevents the browser from running applications? How should it have been architected otherwise if running applications was the goal?
For example instead of grid center, one can use flex and margin auto.
If you are building really nation-wide products, there are still a lot of guys in corporate with old windows (where even chrome stopped updating like win7). Or, you know, old or poor people with PC from 2008.
Also don’t forget guys with mobile phones: not like one could easily install a browser there. Especially on phones which no longer receive updates.
So writing CSS like it is 2015 is great. Not because it feels great but because it is what caring about your users (and business) is.
Otherwise you’ll get humbled by your clients soon enough. And in corporate they won’t even be your clients unless you support old stuff: IE 11 is a great target if you really want to shine.
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